into a telescope, arcs of cosmogony/cosmology, adrift
snow globes, space-time continuum interruptions,
and foreign stop-and-go signals, which finally
culminate in the magician’s pop-up hatted hand
calmly walking across the final pages and into the
next book, Handmade.

The individual works transition from left to right
on the front side (Theogony, Handmade), jumping to
the top for the middle three (Down the Head, Mountain
Man/She-Wolf, Letterpress Flipbook), then essentially
returning again for four more where we began (4-Ply
Toilet Paper, Moleskine, The Magician Manual, Unfinished
Versions). The remaining three objects consist of a self-lighting slide viewer with 11 connected cellular slides
on the top side (M-Phase), a elongated menu-format
Colophon on the front’s bottom with all credits due,
and finally, a inset video monitor which loops an
animation (appropriately titled Curtains) of our hero’s
perforated exploits on TP and an accumulating rain
of top-hatted figures.

Rather than unbox the entirety of the volumes
and their respective contents, I’ll register a few
thoughts on some items of note. The production
presents within the varying volumes, along with
their differing strategies and simple presentation,
make for a genuinely pleasing experience of moving
from one object to the next. Hand forms mutate
between shadow puppet and paper cutouts, ranging
from animals to the weather in accordion-style
pages. Unfolding a map gives way to a cross-dressing
formalwear study. A flipbook of letterpress toilet
paper onto which a five of diamonds dances. But
the real key to the world of The Magician lies within
the covers of Unfinished Versions, which provides a
window into the working process of Byrne over the
10 or so years, while showing facsimile pages of his
sketchbooks of the images and themes that made the
cut and those that did not. I found myself going back
to this volume time and time again, believing that I
was getting closer to the source of inspiration.

The work itself loosely summons the forebear of
Marcel Duchamp and his portable museum, Box in
a Valise, with the hairy Freudian underbelly within
depicted by outsider artists and the unfettered
drawings of children finding their way through
the world using only the stark iconography of
commercial signage and products of the black art.
There are smatterings of bathroom contemplation
interlaced with complex visual allusions and cheeky
sexual peeks. While it all begins with the formation
of our protagonist and leads us through a series of
visual progressions, sleights of hand, and loose
thematic associations, the staggered cycle does the
viewer a service by returning to the work’s initial
sketchbook renderings.

Looking back to my first encounter at the NY Art
Book Fair, I was right to pay heed to the man appearing